Robert M. Warner: 79, the National Archivist, Dies (NYT Obit.)

Robert M. Warner, who built a legislative consensus to wrest the National Archives from political control when he was its director, died on April 24 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 79. The cause was a heart attack after a yearlong battle with cancer, his son, Mark Warner, said.

From 1980 to 1985, Dr. Warner, as the sixth Archivist of the United States, ran the archives, the depository for the nation’s historical documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Nixon tapes.

When he started the job, the archives were a division of the General Services Administration, facing severe budget and staffing cuts, and morale was low. Heads of the G.S.A. were political appointees who did not need archival expertise and could be subject to the whims of presidents. For example, a previous head of the agency had given President Richard M. Nixon control over access to his own White House materials. At the same time, there was a proposal to decentralize the archives and distribute them to several sites around the country, which archivists in the pre-digital age saw as a severe handicap to researchers.

Faced with all these difficulties, Dr. Warner sought to turn his institution into an independent federal agency, capable of requesting its own budget from Congress, rather than relying on executive branch decisions. The archives, founded in 1934, had been part of the G.S.A. since 1949.

“He mobilized groups behind the scenes,” the current United States archivist, Allen Weinstein, said of Dr. Warner....